The SHIV Campaign

[Der Teddy Bar]

Like SHIII I am certain that the SHIV campaign will be good. But like SHIII I am sure that it will have a lot missing and there will be plenty of room for historical improvements.

This is not meant as a derogative mark against the Dev Team, but the reality of development priorities and deadlines.

I know SHIV is a Loooooooooooooong way off, but who here actually has the knowledge? As in real detailed knowledge of ports used, shipping lanes and the type of ships using them as they went to and from Japan?

[Torplexed]

The Japanese Merchant Marine in WW2 is considered the best definitive work of the subject. Sadly, unlike the Allied convoy effort the Japanese one has never been researched to the same extent. A lot of that may be due to careless record keeping and haphazard ship routing by the Japanese themselves.

http://books.stonebooks.com/reading/parillo_japanese.jpg

[DeepSix]

Haven't read that one Torplexed mentioned (but I'm glad I found out about it), but FWIW Clay Blair says the main "bottleneck" of Japanese shipping was through the Luzon Strait. I'm not sure, though, whether that was known during the war or only found out after.

[Bilge_Rat]

Haven't read that one Torplexed mentioned (but I'm glad I found out about it), but FWIW Clay Blair says the main "bottleneck" of Japanese shipping was through the Luzon Strait. I'm not sure, though, whether that was known during the war or only found out after.


It was found out late in the war, early 1944 I believe. After that, US subs were regularly sent to that hunting ground.

[Der Teddy Bar]

As we know it is a long time off, but it would be nice to start organising a NYGM SHIV Team who have the facts and figures etc to improve the campaign.

Plan the Japanese shipping and air campaign out, what ports there should be, what were the shipping lanes, the type of ships in each area and the frequency. What inter island traffic there is etc Sampans and the likes.

Then there is the American ports and airbases as the war changes.

There is a lot more to happen in this campaign than there was in the SHIII. So it would be great to be able to hit the ground running.

[CCIP]

It'd also be great to take those suggestions and throw them over to the devs - so that, if we can't have everything, at least we should hope that they won't omit some of the key stuff and have a default campaign in such a state that it would be easy to add to it without having to 'fix' it (like, say, I had to do by doing that convoy zig-zag/re-routing project).

[Der Teddy Bar]

DeepSix & Torplexed,
Thanks for the pointers regarding the books.

[Threadfin]

The devs need to get their hands on a copy of ONI-208J/ONI-223M . And then that needs to be put in the sim as (one of) the recognition book(s).

http://www.modelwarships.com/reviews/books-plans/scalespecialties/merchant-cd.html

[Captain Krunch]

The devs need to get their hands on a copy of ONI-208J/ONI-223M . And then that needs to be put in the sim as (one of) the recognition book(s).l

I thought the same thing, until I got my hands on ONI-208J and printed it out. It's 419 pages long! It has lots of great data, but it's probably overkill, even for something like SHIV. Hopefully they'll still use it as a basis for their work.

[DeepSix]

http://www.maritime.org/fleetsub/

That's probably overkill, too, but - man! - whatever you want to know about USN fleet boats. There are several other books in that series, too - each one dealing with individual major mechanical systems.

That site also has some recognition manuals (including Germany and Japan, IIRC) for sale on CD-ROM.